A reflection by Mitch Van Acker
People talk of their gut instinct as if trusting it were something to do only in desperation, on a whim, or amid irreconcilable uncertainty—as if their guts weren’t already managing most of their behavior. The gut does a lot more heavy-lifting than people give it credit for. Literally it is home to a mirco-biome of bacteria, a loose federation of trillions of living beings that keeps you alive, generates the surplus energy you use to ponder abstract concepts, and boasts an intimate connection with the brain—the main reason why recent studies have shown gut health to be crucial in maintaining emotional and psychological stability. Hippocrates of Kos (c.460-c.370 BCE) once said “All disease begins in the gut.” Of course what we associate with gut instinct isn’t—at least not at first glance—a functioning digestive tract, but a constellation of hunches, fears, and disgusts that seem to boil up in our midsection whenever we cross into unfamiliar territory. A feeling that is utterly rooted in the body. A feeling that, be it intuition, conscience, or common sense, can—even though it often evades description—be learned and cultivated. Indeed it needs to be if we want to arrive at an ethics subtle enough to thread the needles of our current moral landscape.
Part of our aversion to trusting our guts particularly in ethical decisions is a deep misunderstanding about where our sense of justice comes from. For the longest time, if you were of the secular persuasion, ethics were a carefully worked-out system of Dos-and-Don'ts inspired by the unsullied faculties of reason often against the rebelling “passions.” For religious people it was a gift from God. But morality has far more to do with the body than it does with treatises or scriptures. As the Primatologist Franz De Waal illustrates in his oft-cited “Empathy: Its Ultimate and Proximate Basis,” primates are disposed to altruism, self-sacrifice, and cooperation more than we’ve been led to believe. Rather than the “nasty brutish and short” state of nature that Hobbes imagines in Leviathan, primates structure their societies according to a set of complex hierarchical games where service and social cohesion are rewarded in addition to (not in spite of) strength. Even in the most brutal species of primates, De Waal found that troops based on dominance alone invariably broke down. Luckily, evolution equipped us primates with a web of somatic and autonomic nervous systems that detect and respond to social cues, foster positive imitation and promote social facilitation such that we can tune into socially sustainable behaviors as a matter of direct experience (1). These systems are what I take to be our “gut:” a physical mechanism for social navigation like the orienting reflexes for balance and spatial awareness in the inner ear. These systems, if properly honed, soften our hearts before a nursing mother as well as chill our blood at the sight of Charles Manson. They are the muscles of ethics. And like muscles they grow more robust and dependable the more we use them.
Our confusion surrounding these concrete origins of morality has caused us to falsely attribute the source of moral authority to descriptions of good behavior, not good behavior in and of itself. The world’s ethical codes and religious narratives have as their basis our moral instincts that have been tested by and reinforced in the epigenetic make-ups of generations of human beings according to pressures from the environment and social pressures among themselves. Laws and mythologies are attempts (with varying degrees of success) to recognize and document what is common among the fruits of these hard-won lessons and communicate them to posterity. We seem to have a tendency to give undue reverence to things in writing, as if the world would be mired in constant thievery, treachery, and bloodlust had Hammurabi not inscribed laws against these behaviors in his code or Moses in the commandments. That isn’t to say that humans who lived before written laws led a utopian existence, but had we not had an innate capacity for justice and cooperation we would’ve never made it to the stage of development in which written history or complex storytelling was possible and we’d be wrong to think that symbols arranged on tablets represent the essential gulf between order and unchecked depravity.
Laws are and should be treated as the margins of just behavior, not the origin or ultimate essence of just behavior. This false presumption has convinced us that the way toward eradicating evil is to draw ever-more, ever-finer regulations according to a pure ideal, an idea that treats a physical phenomenon as if it were a textual one. It isn’t so much a move to improve upon our gut instincts as it is an effort to automate them according to a “total” system of thought: to take judgment away from its origins in the body and surrender them entirely to the peerage of discrete methodologies. Methodologies that are not as robust as we’d like to believe. This invites a tendency toward totalitarianism because it implies that behavior can be and should be “edited” to conform unerringly to a complete and final worldview, one that claims to have all of the information it needs or will ever need, a conviction in direct opposition to the mutable nature of human life. This is the dirty secret behind all forms of control, particularly control that privileges the conscious mind and neglects the moral aptitudes of the body. Governance is always trying to square the circle of an ambiguous human nature, one that our nervous systems are far more in touch with than we are. It’s not that regulation doesn’t have it’s uses, but pursuing “perfect” systems to their ultimate conclusions, even if at one level they are virtuous, leads to oppression.
The vast majority of our daily interactions, if not all of them, are completely anarchic, that is to say based in and governed by our subcortical, somatic, and autonomic cognitive structures and not by the moral precepts that describe these systems or the laws that seek to set a common benchmark for following them. Society couldn’t function if this were not the case. Not only because such a society would result in a Kafkaesque hellscape of self-perpetuating bureaucracy (who watches the watchmen, and the watchman watching the watchmen…?) but because of the impossibility of giving a complete account of moral behavior in the first place. We falsely assume a total morality can be spelled out in literal terms. Our subtler philosophers saw right through this assumption. Wittgenstien said that the most serious issues could only be explored properly through jokes. He spent his entire career trying to tease out the limits and infirmities of language that irony can dance around. Irony is the secret history of philosophy. The word irony comes from the greek word “eiron” or clown, what Socrates called himself before the word “philosopher.” I shudder at the thought of the legions of sleepy-eyed undergraduates that leave their first year philosophy courses under the impression the Plato actually thought a totalitarian slave-state ruled by philosopher kings was the ideal society. The main joke of Plato’s Republic—yes, joke—is the impossibility of managing a society according to a series of logical precepts. A society built on perfect logic requires its citizens to be automatons.
Our gut allows us a flexible approach and the conditions for a successful gut-ethic are not the precision and enforcement of a total system but the quality of play.
Yes, play.
Play exists ubiquitously among social mammals with complex nervous systems. Go to any dog park and you’ll see in real-time the construction of a sophisticated proto-ethic that, if dogs were to evolve to the level of human cognition, would later be furnished with the mythological images of a dog religion, and perhaps overthrown by a subsequent dog enlightenment, but it’s basis would remain the same: the toss of the ball, turn of the paw, and self-evident motions of chasing, jumping, and sparring. They are encoding the right practices of social being directly into their nervous systems—rudimentary body perceptions and empathetic behaviors that can scale up into a greater moral awareness as the issues get more complex. Child psychologist Jean Piaget’s work on play and dreams suggests that voluntary play among children is the arena in which humans calibrate their social understanding. If you gather a group of children they will arrange themselves in a variety of different games unprompted. The kinds of games they play and the manner in which they play them is based upon the ethic of fun; if the game isn’t fun they’ll play something else, if an individual child acts in way that makes them not fun to play with that child will be excluded until they adjust their attitude to keep the game compelling and stimulating for as many as possible. Children can play like this for hours without the intervention of an adult authority figure, despite what we micromanaging adults may think. Piaget found from careful observations of these games that children can juggle a laundry list of extremely subtle “rules” that no one child when Piaget interviewed them afterward could give an accurate account of. Piaget thought that these play habits that slide right beneath our conscious attention as children generate and reinforce the primary ethical behaviors we need to survive as social entities, behaviors which expand with practice into subtler forms to navigate the vicissitudes of adulthood.
We should trust our guts at least enough to invest in them. This approach will ultimately give us an edge in feeling out the implicit ambiguities involved in social interaction without crushing them into submission in service of an incomplete logic. The trick is not to regulate behavior more and more but to expand the amount and quality of good behavior practiced, especially at the level of play. We should invest less time in over-clarifying the minute particulars of ethical propositions and opt instead to act, quite separate from our overstimulated conscious minds, in the world. Our delusions surrounding literal control have turned us into moral grammarians eager to pluck jokes from their proper contexts, vilify them, and sap them of their nuance in order to vindicate the repressed school marm inside us all. It is only a slight pivot from draining nuance from jokes to shoehorning facts into unwieldy schemas. And I think that the extent to which we are likely to do so depends in large part how much we’re willing to surrender our powers of moral sensemaking to religion or the latest academic trend, especially in spite of the true sources of ethical dexterity in the forms of free play in children and free thought in adults. The process of moral development can very well be delegated to the material basis of human life as it is hardwired in our nervous systems and calibrated through socialization. There are what John Milton called “the known laws of ancient liberty,” and they have concrete foundation in our symbiosis with the world and with each other. Let’s honor the ethics we can transmit by speech and reason, but not be so naive as to think that our systems of knowledge are broad enough to harbor all there is to know of goodness and truth at one time.
Preston, S., & De Waal, F. (2002). Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25(1), 1-20.
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